Search

Monitoring the quality of drinking water is an important issue for public health. Two of the main objectives of the European Project μAQUA were (i) the development of specific probes to detect and quantify pathogens in drinking water and (ii) the design of standardized sampling programs of water from different sources in Europe in order to obtain sufficient material for downstream analysis. Our phylochip contains barcodes that specifically identify freshwater pathogens for enabling the detection of organisms that can be risks for human health. Monitoring for organisms with molecular tools is rapid, more accurate and more reliable than traditional methods. Rapid detection means that mitigation strategies come into play faster with less harm to the community and to humans. Samples were collected from several waters in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Turkey over 2 years. We present microarray results for the presence of freshwater pathogens from brackish and freshwater sites in Northern Germany, and cyanobacterial cell numbers inferred from these sites. In a companion study from the same samples, cyanobacterial toxins were analyzed using two methods and those sites with highest toxin values also had highest cell numbers as inferred from this microarray study.

The kingdom Chromista contains eukaryotic organisms with tubular mastigonemes on the leading flagellum of their bi-flagellated stages, and plastids within a chloroplast endoplasmic reticulum (CER). The complex series of events leading to the formation of the CER is hypothesized to have occurred only once. Thus, all organisms with plastid-CER connections are believed to be monophyletic and derived from a single secondary endosymbiotic event. Analyses of sequence data from the 16s rRNA gene from three of the four Chromista pigmented classes indicate that these algae are not monophyletic. The validity of the kingdom Chromista and the number of secondary plastid endosymbioses are questioned.